Local Interrupt Disabling

Interrupt disabling is one of the key mechanisms used to ensure that a sequence of kernel statements is treated as a critical section. It allows a kernel control path to continue executing even when hardware devices issue IRQ signals, thus providing an effective way to protect data structures that are also accessed by interrupt handlers. By itself, however, local interrupt disabling does not protect against concurrent accesses to data structures by interrupt handlers running on other CPUs, so in multiprocessor systems, local interrupt disabling is often coupled with spin locks (see the later section Section 5.4).

Interrupts can be disabled on a CPU with the cli assembly language instruction, which is yielded by the__cli( ) macro. Interrupts can be enabled on a CPU by means of the sti assembly language instruction, which is yielded by the _ _sti( ) macro. Recent kernel versions also define the local_irq_disable( ) and local_irq_enable( ) macros, which are equivalent respectively to__cli( ) and__sti( ), but whose names are not architecture dependent and are also much easier to understand.

When the kernel enters a critical section, it clears the IF flag of the eflags register to disable interrupts. But at the end of the critical section, often the kernel can't simply set the flag again. Interrupts can execute in nested fashion, so the kernel does not necessarily know what the IF flag was before the current control path executed. In these cases, the control path must save the old setting of the flag and restore that setting at the end.

Saving and restoring the eflags content is achieved by means of the _ _save_flags and _ _restore_flags macros, respectively. Typically, these macros are used in the following way:

_save_flags(old);

_restore_flags(old);

The__save_flags macro copies the content of the eflags register into the old local variable; the IF flag is then cleared by _ _cli( ). At the end of the critical region, the macro__restore_flags restores the original content of eflags; therefore, interrupts are enabled only if they were enabled before this control path issued the _ _cli( ) macro. Recent kernel versions also define the local_irq_save( ) and local_irq_restore( )